Naturalistic learners

Many of the students at my school have a high degree of naturalistic intelligence. These are learners who are in-tune with nature; who understand how to care for plants or animals; and who prefer to be outside rather than in a classroom.

Planning for these learners is difficult and finding ways to connect their intelligence to a more literary one, even more so. The starter that you can see to the left is one strategy that I tried when my class were studying Macbeth. I must admit I had not anticipated how successful it was going to be. The quality and depth of the students’ talk was very impressive as they made interesting and intelligent remarks that spanned these two intelligences.

Briefly, the idea is based on a pub game. You know the one – “If X was a breed of dog, what would he be?” I gathered a few animal pictures from clipart and Google image and then asked students to connect them to characters from the play.

This exercise is easy to adapt and strikes me as being fairly generic. You might use it to explore historical figures; or places; or aspects of content in most subjects. What it does is to help students form a metaphor that can illuminate their views on a given topic. It also helps to form a link between a topic in school and an under-acknowledged intelligence.